Last night
my Mom hosted a little shindig with some of our closest friends, hers and mine.
I’ve mentioned before how we’ve moved around a fair bit, and although I lived
in Houston for nigh on twelve years it just so happened that many, if not most,
of my friends moved around a fair bit too. The result of all this moving and
shaking is that I have very, very few childhood friends.
But
yesterday I got to spend the evening with some of my best friends in Houston,
some of which I’d lost contact with for a few years and others that I’d kept up
with despite the distance in both time and space. It made me feel like a whole
person again and yet it made me feel all broken apart too. Each of them had an
anecdote, a memory of my family, of the person I was before the person I’ve
become. And I wonder what they see now. Am I still some version of the girl
they knew? Or have I morphed into a completely different human being?
I’ve only
been here a week, and yet, I’ve already started getting a bit melancholic for
the life that could have been. I’ve always suffered from the “what ifs”, and
now, now that my family’s changed, now that my mom lives here permanently
again, now that (due to the husband’s health situation) I likely never will live
here again, now I feel them more than ever. What if I hadn’t gone to Italy for
University, what if I hadn’t married the husband and stayed there, what if I’d
come home sooner, what if he hadn’t had leukemia, what could have been of this
life I live?
When you
grow up in a multi-ethnic household, when you live here and there and
everywhere you end up always feeling a little lost. I’m not Italian, I’m not
Brazilian, I’m not American, I’m a little bit of everything and a little bit of
nothing and it’s hard to stick a definition on it. It’s hard for me to stick a
definition on myself, it’s hard to find something that fits. I spend so much of
my time in Italy daydreaming about coming to America, about coming home, that
it surprises me that when I finally get here I could possibly be so adrift. All
the insecurities of the child I was, the child that arrived from Italy, with
her loud, vivacious, oh so Italian father and her exotic mother, the child that
spoke with a heavy British accent, that struggled to fit in, all those
insecurities of years spent never really fitting in come rushing back to the
surface.
Starting
the year like this frightens me. Always wondering if I’ve done enough in the
past, if I’m doing enough right now, if I am
enough as I am, it’s tiring and scary and very, very unsettling at my age. Am I
pretty enough, am I thin enough, am I elegant enough, am I intelligent enough,
am I interesting enough, am I well-read and well-bred enough, am I loving
enough, am I compassionate enough, am I patient enough…. I could go on and on
and on, and the answer to most of those questions is no.
It’s a
little bit sad and a little bit startling to me that when faced with the ghosts
of Christmases past the thought that underlies all my emotions, my words and my
actions, at the end of the day is am I
good enough? And I don’t like the answer.
